FreshTags Support

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This is where you can find out some details about setting up and operating FreshTags on your own site. Please visit the Main Page for information about FreshTags.

What Are My Design Choices?

There are a few different ways of using FreshTags, depending largely on the depth of your relationship with del.icio.us. This table breaks out the different ways you can get the most out of FreshTags.

Mode	Needs	Recommended	Settings
Listening - passively keeps an ear out for likely tags and presents your readers with relevant titles from the del.icio.us community	None	A low-impact way to freshen up search-intensive pages	user, anchor and archive optional, fixed is left blank.
Fixed - as for Listening mode, but a set of pre-defined tags are 'hard-coded' into the page	A list of predefined tags for your page	Allows readers to explicitly specify their tags, rather than piggybacking on search engine queries	user, anchor and archive optional, fixed is list of space-separated tags.
Bookmarks - share your bookmarks on any page	a del.icio.us account	Give your readers an inkling into your interests, wishlist or recommended reading	user required, anchor and archive optional, fixed is left blank.
Normal - let your readers seemlessly navigate your content by tags	del.icio.us account plus tagged content	Showcase your related content (such as blog posts) to readers and keep them on your site	user required, anchor and archive optional, fixed is left blank.
Archive - provide extra info to readers about your blog	a del.icio.us account and tagged archive pages	If you want to show your readers details like post counts per month	user and archive required, anchor optional, fixed is left blank.

What Do The Options Mean?

Once you've decided on the mode of operation, the Build page asks you to specify some options that affect the content and layout of your FreshTags. This table explains those options.

Parameter	Function
	General
Current Tags	The tags that the reader has currently selected. Use this to check that tags are being picked up properly, or directly edit it to test features (press update).
User	Your del.icio.us username. You can leave it blank for Listening/Fixed modes.
Anchor	This is a tag (or tags) common to all your pages or blog entries that you want to appear here. Use this if you don't want to list every title you have in del.icio.us; for example, if you have multiple blogs you can use a separate anchor tag for each blog so that entries won't overlap. Leave it blank if you want all entries to appear.
Default	This is where you specify the tag (or tags) that FreshTags should use in the event that the user has no current tags selected. Use this if you want to ensure that at least some posts are always listed. For example, tag a selection of your best posts as "highlights" and then use that as your default tag. Alternatively, use your anchor tag as default to list all. Leave default blank if you don't wish to use this feature.
Archive	The tag you used to tag your archive pages. (If you tag your blog's archive pages with a special tag, then you can display additional information such as post count.) Leave blank if you're not using this feature.
Fixed	Specify a space-separated list of tags that you want to list on your blog. Handy for those not using delicious. (Note that using this will over-ride any tags picked up from your delicious account.)
	Tags
Type	Select the type of layout for your tags.
Rows	Enter the maximum number of tags to be displayed. Leave blank if it's variable. (NB: del.icio.us limits results to 100. Use styles for extra control over element presentation.)
Prompt	For drop lists, you can enter a prompt to display, such as "Make a selection".
Custom	(Advanced) Create arbitrary layout for your tags by specifying your own HTML. Only works if you select type as 'custom' above. This string is separated by @. As it's clunky and hard to explain, please only attempt this if you're able to understand what the code is doing.
	Titles
Type	Select the type of layout for your titles.
Rows	Enter the maximum number of titles to be displayed. Leave blank if it's variable. (NB: del.icio.us limits results to 100. Use styles for extra control over element presentation.)
Prompt	For drop lists, you can enter a prompt to display, such as "Make a selection".
Custom	(Advanced) Create arbitrary layout for your titles by specifying your own HTML. Only works if you select type as 'custom' above. This string is separated by @. As it's clunky and hard to explain, please only attempt this if you're able to understand what the code is doing.
	Archives
Type	Select the type of layout for your archives.
Rows	Enter the maximum number of titles to be displayed. Leave blank if it's variable. (NB: del.icio.us limits results to 100 and by default sorts them in reverse-chronological order ie most recent first. Use styles for extra control over element presentation.)
Prompt	For drop lists, you can enter a prompt to display, such as "Make a selection".
Custom	(Advanced) Create arbitrary layout for your titles by specifying your own HTML. Only works if you select type as 'custom' above. This string is separated by @. As it's clunky and hard to explain, please only attempt this if you're able to understand what the code is doing.

Advanced Topics

While getting a basic FreshTags setup off the ground and running can take only five minutes, you may want to extend or tweak your implementation in different ways. Here, you can read up on some of the extra features offered.

Customisation

This is still a bit fiddly and is going to be upgraded in subsequent releases. However, it is workable but not recommended unless you're already reasonably au fait with javascripting. Customisation works by writing out some user-specified HTML each time the script loops through the list of tags (or titles). This user-specified HTML is entered into a @ separated list. The first element is the HTML to be written out at the start of the list; the second element is what to write out for each item; the third is what's written out at the end; and the fourth is the HTML to be written out for an item that is currently selected. Additionally, certain reserved words will be replaced at run time: !url! becomes the URL, !tag! becomes the tag name (tags only), !title! becomes the title of the content (titles only), !count! becomes the tag count (tags only). Also, if you're using multiple tags (ie scroll, list-multi or flat-multi) you can use !murl! to output the multiple tag URL.

Example: Suppose you wanted a custom tag layout that used an ordered list with a title "Topics", counts preceding the item name (in square brackets) and any selected tags to have asterix around them. Yes, it would look ugly, but the custom string would like this (or see it live):

<h4>Pick One</h4><br/><ol>@<li>[!count!] <a href=\"!url!\">!tag! </a></li>@</ol>@<li>[!count!] <a href=\"!url!\">* !tag!*</a></li>

Please let us know about your customisation efforts - we'd love to see what you come up with!

Styles

All page elements created by FreshTags (drop downs, scroll boxes, links etc) are assigned to the classes showtag, showtitle and showarch respectively. This means that you can control how these elements are presented using a style sheet. For example, to control the width of a <select> element (like a scroll box), you just need to include the following in your page template header (ie before the </head>):

You can read up on CSS to find out the full range of parameters you can set: position, colours, borders, font sizes, types, text alignment etc. We'd love to see what you come up with, so please send in examples of your style!

Archiving

The archive feature allows you to tag your blog's archive pages (with a special tag, say "blog_archive"). This means you can use FreshTags' layout functions to list your archives in the sidebar - either built-in or customised. You can also store additional information (such as number of posts during the period) in the notes field and display that too. While manually tagging your archive pages is a bit of a drag and an automated solution is in the pipeline, you can use the bookmarklet provided on the Build page to speed things up.

You should be able to just drag the link on to your browser's "link bar". It will then appear as a button on your browser. To tag your archive pages, visit your first archive page, noting the number of posts on the page. Click the bookmarklet and you'll be prompted to enter the number of posts and then del.icio.us will be updated with this info. Repeat for the next archive page until they're all safely tagged.

NB: the bookmarklet has a stab at the number of posts on each archive page through counting the number of times <div class="post-body"> appears on the page. This is a crude method, but seems to work with most blogs that employ a CSS style sheet. If you don't put the date in your archive name (that is, you're not using Blogger's <$BlogPageTitle$>), please get in touch. Feel free to hack the bookmarklet to something that works for you. And if you have any bright ideas on this problem - please let us know!

What Do These Terms Mean?

FreshTags has introduced some expressions to describe reader-oriented tagging. Here, we provide a brief glossary to some of the most common.

Expression	Definition
Anchor Tag	This is a tag common to all your pages or blog entries that you want to group together. Use this if you don't want to list every title you have in del.icio.us; for example, if you have multiple blogs you can use a separate anchor tag for each blog so that entries won't overlap.
Current Tags	The tags that the reader has currently selected. They could be set explicitly by the reader or guessed at by FreshTags.
Default Tags	If FreshTags can't find any Current Tags, default tags will be used instead (to generate a list of posts).
Generic Mode	Running FreshTags without supplying a delicious username. FreshTags will draw upon the delicious community to find posts of interest to readers.
Tag-Fixing	The act of someone linking to a blog or other page with the current tags pre-set. For example, http://ghill.customer.netspace.net.au/vent/vent.html?tags=zingers will take you to Vent with zingers listed in the sidebar.
Tag-Grabbing	FreshTags "listens" to inbound traffic, sniffing out keywords as likely tags. For example, do a Google search on the phrase "sorely lacking in AFL culture" and you'll get a result for The AFL Player Spectator. When you visit that link, the blog will automatically detect the word "culture" and list posts on that topic in the sidebar. We call this tag-grabbing.
Tag-Passing	FreshTags lets your readers select tags of interest on your blog - and then carry them on to the next blog they read! To see how this works, use the menu on the right to select "culture". Then, in the BlogRoll above, click on Freshblog. You'll notice that on Freshblog, posts about culture have already been listed in the sidebar for your perusal. By letting readers select and pass around tags like this, interwoven communities of interest can bubble up.